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That bandwidth is enough for 1080p60 8bpc on a good day. Is that 4.6Gbps number like a 11g's 54 Mbps? Also this beamforming thing sounds interesting. How would the antennas be placed on something like a phone? I assume range will still be pretty limited. I wouldn't expect more than 10 feet in the open or 3 feet with something in the way.Reply

They are for different applications. ac is in the 5 GHz band - more range and not in-room technology - compared to ad which is in the 60 GHz band. Look at the type of usecases enabled by Wilocity in the Dell business laptop - http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.a... (this is the dock with 802.11ad support that can talk to the notebook on the other side - list of supported models at the bottom of the above link)Reply

You would need a router/AP for every room of your house to do 802.11ad as an ac replacement. The people developing AD have stated it is not an AC replacement. Part of the AD specification states that when you leave the room that the router is in it drops back to AC as the AD signal will fail. On top of that, you'll have to connect all the AP's with 10Gbps connections or you won't be any faster than AC because your connection speed is only as good as the slowest link, which would be the 1Gbps ethernet cable in an AD environment. Based on what I'm reading about AD, I question if there will even be 802.11ad routers as that not what they are stating they will use the protocol for, and it is poorly suited for that environment given its signal limitations.Reply

AD will not be able to go through a wall(it might be able to get through a paper-thin wall though), its not going to be a replacement for AC for a whole-home network. Hell, even 5Ghz has some issues with walls. AD is to replace the wires between your case and the peripherals, as well as peer-to-peer connections when in close proximity. AC will still be the method by which your PC, tablet, cell phone, and console connect wirelessly for a while. At the moment AC can far exceed your average internet connection, even in countries where the average internet connection is absurdly fast.Reply

Additionally, after doing a bit of reading, if you are holding out for the actual 802.11ac replacement, you need to wait for 802.11ax. Its in super-early development, but is the successor to AC and is looking to provide up to 4x the connection speeds in a whole-home network solution.Reply

About all that is known about 802.11ax at this point is its name and that they want it to replace ac and be 4x faster. It's still super-early in its dev stage, and they aren't even sure what all frequencies it may use. The white paper I found on it seems like they aren't going to be increasing the max theoretical throughput, but actually working on increasing the real-world throughput in a heavily load environment. It mentions that, in addition to 2.4 and 5Ghz, they may use other frequencies between 1 and 6Ghz if they become available.Reply

If they go to software defined radio, adding arbitrary bands shouldn't be hard; but other than the proposed 5ghz expansion they're dreaming if they actually expect to get more spectrum released to them. I suppose they could subsume 802.11y to add the 40mhz wide 3.6ghz band (currently US only) to add a bit more spectrum that's more wall transmission friendly than 5ghz; but spectrum in useful frequency bands is already mostly spoken for and the phone companies have already convinced the FCC to let them have almost everything that is transitioned away from govt only (non)use.Reply

The improvements are not based on new bandwidth. The maximum bandwidths and spatial streams will remain the same as in 11ac. The improvements are in the plumbing essentially, as the physical layer will have some significant upgrades to it. The peak throughputs will remain the same per user, but the idea is to improve system throughput in dense environments. It is a bit difficult to explain in a comment section. Since this is an IEEE process, more details are indeed available if you go the 802.11ax task group page (Of course, it may be a bit difficult to parse without the right back ground, and I would expect more white papers and high-level presentations to be available soon as the process becomes more heated). Reply